Xara, the AI-powered banking assistant developed by Xava Technologies, has partnered with Flutterwave to enable users to access a wide range of financial services directly through WhatsApp, eliminating the need for traditional banking applications.
The platform allows customers to send money, pay bills, schedule payments, and manage their finances using text, voice notes, or images, even on low-end devices and unreliable internet connections. This conversational banking platform also supports businesses through Xara for Business, which enables merchants to manage revenue, process bulk transfers, catalogue products, and monitor business performance via a dedicated dashboard on WhatsApp.
Users can interact with the platform in English, Pidgin, Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo, broadening access to financial services for underserved communities.
To strengthen its payment infrastructure, Xara has integrated Flutterwave’s payment rails and Microfinance Bank (MFB) services into its platform. The partnership enables customers to securely access their Flutterwave MFB accounts through WhatsApp while consolidating payment operations that previously relied on multiple providers into a single, unified system.
According to Xara, its rapid growth exposed challenges associated with fragmented infrastructure, as different providers were used for wallets, bill payments, airtime purchases, and money transfers. The company also faced operational complexities related to reliability, reconciliation, and managing multiple application programming interfaces (APIs), prompting the need for a more streamlined infrastructure.
By migrating its financial stack to Flutterwave, Xara said it has simplified its payment ecosystem through a single integration that supports cards, bank transfers, USSD, and other local payment methods via one API. The integration also improves transaction reconciliation, provides a unified view of payment data, and allows the company to introduce new services without maintaining multiple systems.
Flutterwave said the collaboration provides the operational stability and local payment infrastructure required to support Xara’s growing customer base of more than 55,000 users and businesses. The company added that the partnership combines Xara’s conversational banking capabilities with Flutterwave’s enterprise-grade payment infrastructure to accelerate financial inclusion and support the future of digital banking in Nigeria.
Flutterwave noted that its payments, treasury, and banking infrastructure is designed to help businesses consolidate payment operations, reduce complexity, and scale efficiently as they expand their digital financial services.
The partnership represents a significant step in making banking more accessible and intuitive in Nigeria, leveraging the ubiquity of WhatsApp and the power of artificial intelligence to bring financial services directly to users where they already communicate.
